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"Gommera
Woman"
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About the Author... Grant Rodwell
Grant Rodwell was born in 1944 into an impoverished family in the New South Wales high country. Leaving school at fourteen years of age, and having never had the privilege of attending high school, he worked as a lumberjack until he was 22 years of age. Then in a watershed moment in his life, following an accident with a chainsaw and a brisk, forthright conversation with the local doctor, he began correspondence studies for his university matriculation exams, a seemingly impossible task, but one on which the much-respected doctor set considerable imperative.
Four years later, he was a schoolteacher in Tasmania. Later when he was a school principal in Hobart, he took a PhD from the University of Tasmania. He then taught at the Northern Territory University, and later at the University of Newcastle where he was an Executive Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. He has published widely in adult non-fiction, and also has taken a second PhD from the University of Newcastle.
Now living in the Tasmanian Tamar Valley with his beloved wife, Julie, he mixes his first love of writing Australian historical fiction with fly-fishing the trout streams and lakes of the Tasmanian Lakes Country. He has a son, Carl, and a daughter, Jahna, both of whom continue to be a source of immense pride to their mother and father.
A description of Gommera Woman
The novel tells the stunning story of the new country of Australia, a family pastoral empire known as Twin Rivers, and the two brothers who seek to control it.
Richard and Robert Barsden murder Aborigines, and seek to drive them from their land as coolly as they hunt and kill emus. But most of their venom is targeted at Fuhi, their Tahitian half-sister, who not only is pro-Aborigine, but who stands to inherit some of the family's large land holdings stretching across New South Wales.
When at their mother's birthday celebrations in the Barsden Sydney mansion the brothers suggest that the whole family go on a long sea voyage in the family's new sailing ship in order to bind the family together. William and Esther Barsden, the brothers' adopted parents, enthusiastically agree, and encourage the doubting Fuhi to travel with them. But the brothers have a dark and nefarious plan up their sleeves.
Back on the New South Wales western plains Fuhi's meeting with the Yankee, Caleb Williams Saleeby, and her falling in love with this mysterious character, simply complicates her brothers' plans to murder their parents and sister and brother.
Fortunately, fate has something else in store for Fuhi, who surely many readers will consider to be one of the most complex characters in modern literature. Pregnant and in love, she and Caleb survive a planned shipwreck off the New South Wales south coast. But soon her beloved Caleb is taken in a shark attack, but she survives the shark attack, and aided by a pod of orcas, she struggles to shore, where eventually she is taken in by Aborigines, and becomes one of their gommera - their shaman. After learning all of the often-deadly powers of the gommera, with her son, she begins the long journey back to European society to confront her past, and set right all of the wrongs that her brothers have thrust upon her.
But first she must secure enough wealth to bring her murderous half-brothers to justice. Assisted by her two faithful Aboriginal foremen from years gone by, she succeeds in discovering the golden reef in the New South Wales high country that her beloved Caleb had first discovered.
Fuhi lures Richard and Robert into attempting to murder her along an isolated road, but the brothers are forced to follow her deeper into the high country where she eventually confronts them, and using all the terrible and mysterious powers of the gommera she destroys them.
In this novel the author's fertile imagination touches on everything from gold prospecting to Aboriginal life, and in the process creates a rich, all consuming you-are-there feel to the tale. More than that, he has created characters who literally live and breathe on the page, particularly Fuhi, who is unforgettable as is this absorbing and stunning vivid work.
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